THE VERGE - July 8 - Audio-only, invite-only social network Clubhouse neglected to develop or enforce strong community guidelines before launch - and the oversight could derail a company valued at $100M while still in private beta. Clubhouse is barely a few months old, and currently has just two full-time employees - its founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. Clubhouse does not allow users to report harassment or other violations of its terms of service through the app. Screenshots of beta tester forums show users begging Clubhouse's founders to, among other things, write comprehensive community guidelines. The app is currently in a closed beta.
Clubhouse Is Learning the Hard Way That Content Moderation Needs to Come First
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Trell Surpasses Twitter and Pinterest in India
EXPRESS COMPUTER - July 9 - Trell has surpassed Twitter and Pinterest in India with ~5M daily active users. Trending at #1 in Free Lifestyle Apps, the platform has received 1.2M uploads in a single day with 400K+ new content creators. Trell is the go-to platform for users to share their experiences, recommendations, and reviews across various categories including health and fitness, beauty and skincare, travel, movie reviews, cooking, home-décor and much more. The lifestyle vlogging platform allows users to create 3-5-minute videos in their native languages along with a 'shop' feature that lets them purchase the products featured in the vlogs. Additionally, the platform also allows users to earn rewards, goodies and vacations through its interface.
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LinkedIn Introduces Page Invitation Credits to Curb Spamming
EDGY - July 7 - LinkedIn has introduced page invitation credits, alongside other measures, to prevent users from spamming page follow invites. The new page invitation credits can limit the number of invites that LinkedIn page admins can send out each month. Before now, page admins could send as much as 50 invites per day. That's a 1,500 invites every month. Page admins will now have access to 100 credits per month for inviting connections to follow their page.
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ASMALLWORLD Expects Growth and Positive EBITDA for H1 2020
MARKET SCREENER - July 7 - ASMALLWORLD AG grew its revenues during H1 2020 and expects a positive EBITDA for the first six months of 2020, despite a difficult market environment due to the global COVID-19 health crisis. H1 revenue is expected to come in above CHF 5.7M ($6M). Compared to June 2019, the company grew its member base from ~55K to ~61K, which represents an 11% increase. Full financial results for the first half of the year will be published on 27th August 2020.
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Parler CEO: Social Media Companies Are Behaving Like Publishers by Censoring
FOX BUSINESS - July 7 - Parler, the free speech social network, has seen an influx of new users. "Major social media companies will not "admit" they are behaving as publishers through their censorship policies," said Parler CEO John Matze. "I think they are censoring." Parler has seen an influx of new users after Trump signed an executive order in May that could remove some of social media company's liability protections if they engage in "selective censorship" harmful to national discourse.
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TikTok Faces Ban in the US; Pulls out of Hong Kong
TECH CRUNCH - July 7 - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States is "certainly looking at" banning TikTok over concerns that it could be used by the Beijing government as a surveillance and propaganda tool. The potential ban would deal another blow to TikTok after it recently went down in its biggest market, India. On the heel of Pompeo's statement, TikTok announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national security law.
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Google Plus Officially Gone, Rebranded as Currents
IANS - July 7 - The Currents app is very similar to the Google Plus app it replaces. The UI is mostly unchanged and many of Google+'s features are still present. The new app is described as a place where people will be able to connect with their colleagues, exchange documents, interact with like-minded people who have similar interests. Currents is available for G Suite customers only.
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The Way We Like to Do Things at VSN - All Credit to Journalists
VSN - July 8 - We believe it's not ok to re-write content from journalists. They deserve full credit. This is why we merely illuminate content, and do short culling executive summaries and then point you to their bio and content.
We link to the journalists profile, along with other articles on the company featured in the article, and we drive you, our executive readers, to the original article. It doesn't matter if you're finding the summary in your email, or social media, we're not trying to land you back at our website so you can view ads. We're sending you to the originating article so you can view their ads, or better, subscribe to their outlet.
We illuminate the top news. The news you can use to make smarter and more informed decisions...and we make sure we give full credit and recognition to the amazing journalists that work so hard (on ever-tighter deadlines and budgets) to research and write the news.
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The Rise of Niche and Vertical Social Networks
FORBES - Dec 21 - According to eMarketer, Facebook lost ~2M users under the age of 25 in 2018, and the number of Facebook users keeps dropping. Other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn are losing young users as well. The reason is the growing interest in vertical networks. A vertical social network is a specifically targeted social network that connects people with very specific interests, hobbies, and passions. People on vertical networks can receive specific and targeted content on a daily basis and, even connect with people who share the same interests. There is a variety of vertical social networks catering to different individuals, including Behance, StackOverflow, Goodwall and ResearchGate. Behance is an advanced vertical network for creative individuals. It allows artists and designers to showcase their work and discover new art every day. On 2012, Adobe acquired Behance for $150M. StackOverflow provides questions and answers related to code development and the surrounding challenges. Goodwall is a community of 1M students and young professionals who connect to discover opportunities from $1M+ in scholarships to 5M+ jobs and internships. ResearchGate is the platform for scientists and researchers to share research articles.
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Welcome to VerySocialNetwork.com
VSN - July 6 - Here we are, 5 years later, and boy has the world changed! Facebook now rules the social networking industry, and we see a burgeoning vertical social networking industry forming. i.e. there's lots of breakout communities with unique experiences and more specific niche focus. Look at Tik Tok, Meetme, Hornet, and Stitch, for example. All wildly different communities, experiences and all with very considerable followings.
So, after 5 years, we've decided to blow the dust off the creaky old Social Networking Watch blog, rebrand and refocus it. We are a Very Social Network, so we figured this would be exceptionally apt for us to rename to. This new iteration of Social Networking Watch, which was actually started way back in 2006 no less!, will focus in on Online Social Communities, a.k.a. Vertical Social Networks. We're going to focus on the term Online Social Communities.
We're also starting the Online Social Community Association as a free to join community for leaders of the online social community and vertical social networking industry. One and the same, actually. So we'll just call it the online social community industry moving forward. Please email me if you are a leader of an online social community and would like to be considered for membership to OSCA. You can find out more at www.OSCA.gp.
Thanks. We're off to the races! It's so good to have this blog back live after a 5 year hiatus. We'll continue to serve up daily news summaries for decision makers, but now we're a little more focused in, dialed in, to the news for online social communities. That means, we'll rarely run news on Facebook. We're focused on the niches and verticals now.
- Mark Brooks, President OSCA
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Focus!
SNW - Feb 10 - Moving forward we'll be focusing our attention and efforts on the Internet dating business. We've run OnlinePersonalsWatch.com since 2004, and love the iDating business.
SocialNetworkingWatch.com was started in 2006. Today we're ceasing our work on it. Our passion lays with the iDating business and we'll be focusing on that moving forward.
Please comment here, or email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com.
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Twitter Partners With Google To Make Tweets Searchable
MASHABLE - Feb 5 - Twitter has reached a deal with Google that will make its Tweets instantly searchable. It's unclear how the Google deal will affect deleted tweets. Twitter's deal with Google isn't the first of its kind: It already has deals in place with Bing and Yahoo, wherein the company shares user data.
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Facebook Has Declared War On YouTube
VENTURE BEAT - Feb 3 - Facebook’s autoplay feature on videos is extremely engaging. This key feature is not only pushing YouTube videos off Facebook, but also contributes to an increased rate of video watching and ad revenue from videos. YouTube reacted immediately by autoplaying the “related videos” at the end of each YouTube video play. What YouTube can do, which will have a bigger impact on numbers, is to simply activate the autoplay (not just related videos) in all embeds, without audio, just like Facebook.
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Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Can Now Run On Other Sites And Apps
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 4 - Twitter is syndicating its promoted tweets to other services, starting with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan.
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Buy LinkedIn Before Earnings
CNBC - Feb 4 - LinkedIn is a "buy" before earnings later this week as new products take hold and mobile advertising improves, according to Goldman Sachs. Goldman is predicting a 43% increase in Q4 revenue to $634M.
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Twitter Cofounders Stand Behind CEO Despite Criticism From Investors
MASHABLE - Jan 30 - Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo is doing just fine — at least that's the message from the company's board of directors. While Costolo has a long history at Twitter and is said to be well-liked by many employees, he is neither a founder nor a majority shareholder in the company, and therefore more susceptible to the whims of investors.
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Swipe Raises $6.5M To Combine Tinder And Photo Sharing
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 30 - Sherpa Ventures, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital and Binary Capital invested $6.5M into the app at a $50M pre valuation. With Swipe’s iOS app (Android coming soon) users take a photo or video, write on top of it if they want, and share it with all their friends. Friends can then swipe left to delete it, swipe right to like it, and swipe up to reply to the author. The catch is they don’t know who the author is. Only if they exchange messeges will their identity be revealed.
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Facebook Beats Estimates In Q4 With $3.85B Revenue
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 28 - Facebook now has 1.393B users (890M daily users, 1.19B mobile monthly users), up 3.18% quarter over quarter. The company brought in $0.54 EPS on $3.85B in revenue. Mobile made up 69% of ad revenue compared to 66% last quarter, showing its business is now firmly mobile.
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Chat App Kik Hits 200M Registered Users
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 27 - Kik just passed 200M registered users, but CEO and co-founder Ted Livingston played down that milestone, saying that it “doesn’t really matter all that much.” The chat app has raised $70M to date. According to ComScore, Kik ranks second behind Snapchat on active U.S. users. Kik is focusing on America’s young, mobile-first generation. Kik's users aged under 20 are most engaged with its service.
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Facebook Q4 Earnings Preview: $10B Annual Revenue
MASHABLE - Jan 27 - Facebook is expected to post earnings of $0.48 per share on revenue of $3.77B. If Facebook comes anywhere near that estimate, it will top $10B in annual revenue for the first time in its history.
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